Networks are rapidly becoming overloaded and taxed with traffic from governments, organizations, and private individuals. In particular, the Internet is increasingly being used to conduct business, acquire information, and for leisure. Moreover, there have been recent governmental efforts made to ensure all participants within the United States have affordable access to high speed connectivity to the Internet. However, if every participant were to have a high speed connection to the Internet, then websites will become even more overtaxed and not be capable of supporting the increased speed with which transactions are received and processed.
To respond to this overtaxing situation, enterprises have replicated services delivered over the WWW to provide multiple access points. The access points are hidden from the users whom believe they are accessing a single WWW site. In some cases, enterprises have also seen this situation as an opportunity to increase revenue by selling high-end services, such as Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections to their services, and the like. But even upscale and paid for VPN's are becoming overburdened with the rapidly expanding commerce of the Internet.
Generally, when a request for an enterprise's service is received at a WWW site of the enterprise, the request is routed at a low level network connection, such as the transport layer in response to some load-balancing application. But higher-level attributes associated with the request are often ignored in this process. Thus, even higher-privileged users of the enterprise may not be able to change the level of service they receive from that enterprise.
In effect, there is no reliable way to differentiate a response time experienced by a privileged user of an enterprise versus that which is experienced by a non-privileged user of the enterprise. The designation of what is privileged versus what is non-privileged is often maintained at a network application layer that is at a much higher level of abstraction than where routing takes place.
Thus, what is needed is a mechanism for improved routing of network requests for services in order to properly address higher privileged users of those services.